


how much was mine to keep

by WolfSpider



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-11-26 22:25:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18186434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: On the day that Five disappeared into the nothing future, Vanya disappeared with him. Forty years is a long time to be alone.





	how much was mine to keep

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a prompt on the Umbrella Academy kink meme: "Vanya gets trapped in the future with Five when he leaves that day. They spend the next forty-plus years together and in those years Vanya realizes that she really loves Five. Even more, she gets jealous of the Handler and how much she wants Five. Vanya does something about it."
> 
> Sorry that I spun your request out into a sad apocalypse romance novel, dude.

The world ended for Five and Vanya at dinnertime on an ordinary Thursday, sixteen years earlier than it was meant to.

Vanya felt like she was always chasing after her siblings: always one step behind, never good enough, trying to keep pace in a race she wasn’t even competing in. When their father finished his parable about time streams and acorns and Five bolted from the room, she followed him. It was what she did. Meek little Vanya Hargreeves, who desperately didn’t want to be left behind.

They’d had this conversation before, the one that went, _I’m ready, I can do this!_ and then _Just wait for Dad, Five, please, I know you know what you’re doing but what if--_ Vanya listened to Five, but you couldn’t tell Five anything, which is what comes of being propped up all your life as special, powerful, different, unique. Five didn’t just think he knew better than everyone, he _knew_ he did, so off he went, the sight of his retreating back sparking an icy rush of fear that churned like slush in Vanya’s stomach, a panic for which there was no pill to ease. The same anxiety that closed off all the air in her lungs and froze every muscle fiber stiff and fluttered her heart fast as a rabbit’s impelled in her, this time, a different response. Fight, flight, freeze.

This time she chose a new option, kicked off and went running after him.

Through the foyer, shoes scuffing against the slickly polished dark wood floors, their father’s record skipping; Five was out the great glass front doors and down the stairs, past the gate, before she got close enough to touch. “Five!” she called, but for once he didn’t hesitate for her, didn’t turn back just to look. He was accelerating, and the air around him was tinging blue with the crackling corona of St. Elmo’s Fire that signaled the start of a jump he was leaning into. Uncoordinated with senseless, stupid fear ( _don’t leave, Five, don’t leave me, you can’t, not until we’re sure you can come back--_ ) she swiped for his hand clumsily once, twice, found purchase with her fingers tight around his palm and slipping from clammy sweat. _That_ made him look back, surprised and annoyed and then dawning in recognition in the split second before the ephemeral stuff of empty reality ripped open around them and they jumped--

\--into bright golden summer, Vanya tripping into it like she’d knocked her feet against a step in the concrete sidewalk she hadn’t seen, his hand pulling her forward and up so that her stumble turned into a skip, back into a run. The sun was bright and she didn’t recognize the day, but somehow it _felt_ familiar on her skin, a place she’d been to before: this same stretch of road out front of the coin laundry and the corner store, revisited. “Vanya,” Five started, sounding breathlessly, elatedly winded, but shrugged off whatever he was going to say, rebuke or rapprochement or note of wonder-- _look what I can do!_ \--and just fit his fingers better through hers instead, the angle of their wrists uncomfortable as he threaded them together. Always impatient, he tugged harder at her arm, pulling at her shoulder, urging them onward--

\--and they were still going faster, as fast as Vanya could keep up with, which wasn’t very, as the colors of summer flashed past into bracing cold and a wet wind that whipped fat snowflakes in her face, the chill and the stuttering beat of her heart filling her cheeks rosy. They were a little over halfway down the block and two years back in time as he grinned at her over his shoulder, bright and brilliant, and it was the best thing that had ever, ever, ever happened to Vanya. This was power. It felt like freedom. This was something precious and extraordinary, and it was only for the two of them, a secret for Five and Seven to share. She began to laugh, and then they were both laughing, what little breath was left in their lungs bubbling out like an overfull soda glass foaming over--

There was still a crown of snowflakes melting into her dark hair when they landed for the last time. Entering into the future was like opening your front door and walking confidently into a brick wall; like opening an oven and letting the electric heat roll into you. The air was hot and solid with ash and particulate matter, baked dry, dusty and stagnant and rotten. It got instantly into the wet places in the soft sponge of her lungs and the back of her throat and she coughed herself hoarse, stumbling for real over jutting slabs of broken asphalt, crumbled mortar, fallen beams. “Five,” she tried again, rough and urgent, and over the dull un-sound of the fire eating the wind he shouted, “I know!”

She could see his jaw clenched, the sick-strung tension corded down his neck, and his fingers clenched to a fist between hers so tight she could feel his bones against her bones and nothing else there, crushed bloodless. The world was chaos, and there was no laughter anymore. He took them around a corner, circled the block, an oppressive humming pushing at the insides of her ears as the light of his power coursed over his hands, up his arms, slid off of them. Her legs burned, thighs and calves, all those muscles she’d been told she’d never have a use for, a pain like acid eating away at her, and the next time she slipped she almost twisted her ankle and brought him down with her. “Come _on_ ,” he growled, sharp like a gunshot, and his frustration stung worse than a sudden slap in the face, but numbed by shock she forced herself through it, holding all the pieces of herself together until they rounded the corner again and came back to where they started by way of skipped decades, and the house that wasn’t there anymore.

Most of the Hargreeves house was just gone. Some of it was scattered around the street in haphazard piles, like a set of blocks a toddler knocked carelessly over. There was a spray of glass from the shattered front doors that caught the firelight like spilled diamonds, and a distant, practical part of her worried about what would happen when Five ripped his hand from hers and went down to his knees, an uncontrolled demolition; _what if he cuts up his legs?_ The ringing in her ears was getting louder. It was a car alarm, screaming out its dying pain from somewhere down the street.

“Fuck!” Five shouted. Vanya reached for him again but he shrugged her off, scrambling back up and half stumbling into the wreckage, picking his way with not enough care through the crumpled doorway with Vanya hovering after him, drawn by his gravity. The heat of the air against her skin was like an incipient sunburn, but mostly she just felt numb, calm and still on the surface, the way her medicine made her: like a lake in winter, frozen up above, only alive underneath. “Ben?” he called, words failing to fill up all the nothingness. “Klaus?”

“Dad?” she suggested to the universe, adding her voice to his. No one answered, but she hadn’t expected them to; the only person who ever listened to Vanya wasn’t paying her much attention right now.

Vanya watched Five kick at a slumped pile of bricks until the smashed up stonework shifted, watched his thin chest shudder and deepen with a hitching breath. Quieter: “Oh, _fuck_. Vanya, don’t-- don’t come over here. Don’t move.” He ran a crabbed, shaking hand through his perfectly combed hair, mussing it, and dug the heel of his wrist against his forehead, tense with panic.

A lifetime of conditioned responses told her to obey. Vanya swayed uncertainly then shuffled forward, cautious and overwhelmed-- wanting to see what he saw, not have to be sheltered. “Oh,” she whispered, voice a dry and brittle thing. From beneath the pile of broken brick extended a thin pale arm, skin bloodless and greying, chipped black paint on the bitten nails and fading ink at the inside of the wrist. Under the taste of grit and dust there was a sweetly sour smell in the air, blood and putrefaction.

“Shit,” Five snarled unhappily, eloquence reduced to expletives by shock and despair. She hovered closer, step by step, until he saw her coming from the corner of his eye and rounded on her, something wild and wrathful in his eyes. “This is your fault,” he spat, gesturing broadly at the desolation, accusing her implicitly of the broken, blasted buildings, of the fires, of Klaus’ limp arm, the whole world asunder. She should have felt something, Vanya thought, but the shock was still flowing through her-- all that loss left her numb.

“That’s not fair,” she told him quietly. Reginald Hargreeves’ thin, stern voice rattled _Fair is what you earn_ around in the back of her head.

“I don’t… If I’d been jumping alone, this wouldn’t have happened. I could’ve done it. I could have gotten _back_ , warned everyone.” Flecks of ash smeared themselves under his eyes, streaking his sweaty face dirty. “You ruined it,” he growled, and he clenched his fists, straining until the blue light enveloped them and then fizzled out to sparks; flicked his wrists again and again like clicking at a cheap lighter that had long since run through its fuel.

Vanya shrieked, and ran at him, and he let her catch his elbow, squeezing too hard at his arm through stiff dark felt as the impact of her body knocked them back by inches. “Don’t,” she said, afraid for the first time, frightened in a way that the unimaginable scale of the death around them hadn’t impressed upon her. The horror was too large to really comprehend all at once-- you had to break it down and assimilate it one bit at a time, and the first piece was the old terror of being alone. “I’m sorry. You can’t leave me here. Please, I’m so sorry.”

She felt her own voice in her throat, flat and small but urgent, and watched his face smooth over as the anger fizzled out too. Then his hand was on top of hers, cool and dry and sturdy, and he’d put his body between her and Klaus’ cairn. “Don’t be preposterous,” he said, which was as close to an apology as he was probably capable of. “Of course not.”

The fires burned through the night, crenelations capping each jagged outcropping of rubble that crisped everything of any value to dust, and the light bounced off the bellies of smoke clouds to fill the valley that had once been a city with ephemeral orange light while they buried their siblings, doing arithmetic in their heads, counting up the missing. One plus Two plus Three plus Four, minus Five Six and Seven. Vanya had seen all manner of grotesque injuries second hand in the course of the Academy’s work, the slick loops of dangling entrails hanging from the bodies of thugs torn apart, bruises and contusions and spurs of shockingly white broken bone pushed up through ruptured skin, chemical burns, limbs sticking out at wrong angles, but it was harder to be dispassionate about the broken bodies of people you once knew.

The faces were different, thinner or wider, melted free of baby fat, familiar enough to make Vanya’s heart shudder but different enough for elapsed years to have made them all strangers. Allison’s eyes were open, milky like scratched glass, which left no doubt that she was dead, though in every other respect she was beautiful, skin smooth and perfect save where it was open and splattered with blood, wide hips, dressed in a skirt and cardigan that had been fashionable before calamity had torn it to rags. Vanya knelt in the dust beside her and wondered if she should close Allison’s eyes, and then wondered what was wrong with her that she couldn’t cry.

Five was somewhere behind her, wrestling Luther’s massive body under crumbled brick, which was as good of a burial as any of them were likely to get. She didn’t like to have him out of her line of sight, but as long as she could hear him rustling around, breathing tight through his mouth, it was alright. “Do you think, Ben…” she started, trailing the sentence off before it could get too hopeful.

“No,” Five said, without stopping to consider it. He clapped mortar dust from his palms and wiped them off on the fronts of his slacks.

“I don’t either.” Vanya drew her legs up against her chest and nuzzled down into her knees until her cheekbones hurt. Allison still had long hair, curly and fuzzy, fading into highlights, and she had probably died a little before everyone else on Earth. “Is it bad that I’m happy Klaus isn’t here?” she asked, voice muffled. “All this death, I can’t even imagine what it would be like for him.”

“He would have been useful, though,” Five said. “Could’ve found somebody to tell us what the hell happened here, maybe.” Vanya, who had walked past Klaus’ room at night enough to hear the things he whispered in his sleep, held her tongue. She’d always had the impression that the dead were just as useless as the living.

Firelight gleamed brassy and low off a fine chain still looped loosely around Allison’s neck. Vanya had a headache, the kind that felt like someone’s fingers pressing at and into her temples.

The locket was shaped like the idea of a heart, something sweet and symbolic and childish, and Vanya tried not to touch her sister’s stiff neck as she unclasped it, easing the chain out from under her. Dust had almost filled in the shallow engraving of _A+L_ in the metal, and Vanya tried to work out that arithmetic as well, though the equation wasn’t surprising. Vanya was like a ghost in that house, too, thin and insubstantial, a thing of shadows, and no one had ever noticed her lurking around corners, beneath the stairs, so she’d absorbed a lot of other people’s secrets. She knew that Ben had been afraid of the dark and that Klaus kept mens’ catalogs under his bed and that Allison and Luther found a comfort in each other that she envied. The way Allison was laying sprawled against the ground her head twisted towards where Five had put Luther, and Vanya decided to leave her eyes open, for all the good that it would do. Every gesture was empty now, and a burial was for those left behind, who could appreciate it more.

Somewhere, in another time that Vanya couldn’t touch, Allison was still alive, and maybe she was happy, and maybe she was loved. Vanya held the locket tight in her hand until the metal got warm from her skin like the moon borrowing light from the sun and the hard edges of it dug ruts into her soft palm, and then she slipped it into her pocket, knowing that it didn’t belong around her own neck. There was a scream somewhere inside her, but it was muted, and she still couldn’t cry, wasn’t sure if she even wanted to. Maybe whatever horrible thing that was building inside of her should stay there, without release.

When he’d finished pushing rocks around uselessly, Five came over to her side and loomed there awkwardly for a moment. Eventually he put his hand on her shoulder, dirty with sweat and ash. There was a dark layer of old blood ground under his fingernails, and the skin was splitting raw and angry and chapped around his knuckles. Still, he squeezed at the ball of her shoulder, and the pressure woke her up. “None of this is going to be real,” he told her. “I’ll get us back there. We’ll stop it. It isn’t going to count.”

Vanya leaned into him and closed her eyes. “If it’s okay with you,” she said, “I’d still like to not be right _here_ anymore.”

\---

The Hargreeves’ upbringing had left them spectacularly poorly adapted for independent life in a world outside the boarding house, though it was possible that no one, anywhere, even the sort of person who had a bunker buried in cement in their backyard full of canned water and stockpiled ammunition, was well adapted to the conditions of an apocalypse. After everything that could burn had stopped burning the streets were just quiet-- not the reverent, expectant quiet of a theater backstage before a show or a church all empty of prayer, but the quiet of the deep desert or the murky bottom of the ocean. Everything was over, and they’d torn the set all down. Vanya wondered at first, as they picked their way carefully between the skeletal husks of blasted cars and imploded apartment buildings, if the survivalists had prepared enough, if any minute now they would be coming out of their bunkers like the dead rising from their mausoleums on judgment day or if they had all boiled alive down there in their cellars.

It was a morbid thought, but there were nothing but morbid thoughts left to have.

There had once been a gas station with a grubby little convenience store three blocks south of the house and Five took them there, or at least to the crater where it had been. Walls had been perforated and collapsed in on themselves like soggy bread, but they ducked under a bent awning of twisted girders and found the inside of the shop dark and cavernous but comparatively intact. Racks of potato chip bags and beef jerky sticks had been knocked into each other like dominoes, forming a treacherous maze. All the windows had been blown out, and when the glass crunched under her feet Vanya could feel it buzzing in her blood. “Grab anything that looks like it’ll spoil, first,” Five said. “Might as well use it while it lasts.”

They took off their jackets and tied them into makeshift knapsacks, into which went bottles of warm soda from the unplugged cooler and fat stacks of individually wrapped unnaturally colored American cheese product and jerky sticks and squarish cans of spam, like kids loose in a candy store, spoiled for choice as long as whatever they desired came wrapped in foil and slathered in nitrates. It was joyless work, that subversion, so different from the nights when they’d gorged themselves on donuts at Griddy’s, unable to sleep even before they’d started slurping down thick black coffee. There had been nights when Five had shaken her awake with a hand on her shoulder and another over her mouth to keep her quiet and snuck them both out through solid walls, just the two of them, darting down wet alleys to share a plastic-fronted paper box of a baker’s dozen of the night’s last donuts in the parking lot, watching the waitress wipe down tables though the big front windows after they’d closed and letting the soft light of neon turn their skin blue as the light of a morgue.

She’d loved those nights. It had made her feel special and human to be chosen, because she knew Five never snuck out alone with anyone else. For a few hours in the waning early morning they’d been just regular kids skirting curfew, sugar high with frosting and cake crumbs crusted around their lips, snickering at some private joke, and sometimes their hands would brush just lightly enough that she could imagine it unintentional, the flash of warm skin a comfort and a thrill.

All that was gone now, every small kindness, every possibility, and absolute freedom started to feel like another shackle.

Vanya wasn’t hungry but they sat with their backs against half a rough brick wall as the sun came up and she picked at a slice of cheese, tearing it into tiny pieces and letting it melt on her tongue. Her cherry coke already tasted flat. “I didn’t bring my medicine with me,” she said into the silence after a while. “I’m supposed to take it two times a day, it says on the bottle.”

They were sitting so close together that their shoulders touched, and she could feel his harsh, sudden intake of breath, thought she could hear his heart very loud in her ears. “Shit,” he said. “What do you take it for again, anyway?”

It seemed unspeakably embarrassing to admit that she didn’t really know. The pills just appeared with breakfast and dinner, Mom tipping the little yellow and blue capsules into her cupped hand with a smile. “Anxiety,” Vanya said, and they solemnly considered their surroundings and the situation, to which anxiety was the only rational response.

Five chewed through a tough bite of jerky before answering. “Well, we’ll figure something out.”

“I’m sorry,” Vanya said, and meant it this time, ashamed as always of being a burden. “I’m not going to be very helpful.”

He shrugged, and she felt the motion move through her. Five’s voice seemed to fill up her chest, fill up the whole world. “Vanya, honestly,” he said, the way he said things that were meant only for her, “I don’t know what I’d do with myself if you weren’t here.”

\---

The second day was worse than the first had been, because the comforting anesthesia of shock had worn off. The sky was ochre and clotted with unnatural clouds, and the city underneath it was a charnel house, a vast silent necropolis now, and it was beginning to stink with the sweet bloated fumes of spoiling meat. _Necropolis_ was from the Greek, Five said, as they walked a little. It was an aimless, circular walking, because there was no device they could climb into to take them back like in the movies, couldn’t just get into someone’s burned out Delorean and drive away back to safety, and the science that might save them hadn’t been written yet. But walking was better than sitting and staring and trying to guess what half a crushed building might once have been, even if their footsteps echoed too loudly and beat against the inside of her skull.

 _Necropolis_ , said Five, quite literally meant ‘city of the dead’. It was an evocative name for a cemetery, and usually one with elaborate monuments and designer tombs, placed outside the city limits. The tradition of making tombs as nice as houses went a long way back; people really liked the lie that their dead might be sleeping, that the ghosts might have need for beds and chairs and ceremonial forks in the world beyond. The Egyptians had shoved all that crap right in their burial chambers, so if the king woke up in the middle of the century he wouldn’t have to look far to find his favorite dinner plate.

Five had always talked a lot, and mostly only to her, which was also a point of withering pride. She could tell that he wasn’t really listening to what he was saying, that all the jawing kept his mind oiled and working smoothly while he turned the facts of their situation over in his head, and she liked listening to him anyway. Most of the time. The longer they walked the more strongly she could feel the throb of the vibrations in the air, a pulsing hot thrum that made her vision waver like heat haze or the view through melting glass. Every soft sound scraped over her skin, pressed paresthetic pins and needles into every exposed tissue, and she shuddered, hugged herself tighter.

“What do you think the withdrawal symptoms are?” she asked, interrupting his lecture. “Am I supposed to feel dizzy?”

He’d been walking a little ways ahead of her, Vanya dragging her feet unsure and lethargic, but he turned to face her, frowning sternly. “That might be the heat,” he said. “Or dehydration. You’re not _supposed_ to feel anything in particular. Do you have a headache?” She nodded. “What else?”

“I feel… tender.” Vanya blushed. It sounded stupid, and she felt stupid, but that was what it was, a full body ache that inflamed her skin. “Everything’s too loud. I can hear my blood pumping.” That was a gentle sluicing sound, like a river pouring away towards the sea, water crashing on rocks.

Five’s frown deepened. “Should I stop talking?”

Vanya shook her head, heard her heart clench in her chest as her flush burned deeper. “No. I like your voice.” And she willingly let it expand to be the whole of her world as they went on, leaned into the comfort of that feeling, Five waiting for her to catch up to him before he started walking again, side by side.

Her headache was malignant, expanding into every tissue and vesicle of her body. It pounded worse when they picked up the little red Radio Flyer wagon, a childish device supremely at odds with the rest of their surroundings that was a godsend in terms of dragging around heavy cans of provisions with them. One of the wheels was a little lopsided and loose, and it squealed petulantly on its axis with every rotation as they forced it over uneven terrain. When the sun went down it didn’t get cold, all the heat trapped under the impact clouds of dust blown heavy into the atmosphere, and they sat down to eat again, Vanya forcing herself to spoon tepid mushy canned carrots into her mouth.

“This kind of thing is what they think killed the dinosaurs,” Five said, pointing at the dirty sky to avoid having to eat. “The meteor, sure, but that was a local event. It was the changes in the weather that wrecked things on a global scale, all that debris in the air insulating in the heat and keeping out the sun. The plants starved and then the things that ate the plants starved, and then eventually even the corpse scavengers starved too.” He stared mulishly into a suspect can of soup. “So eat your goddamned dinner, I guess, while you still can.”

Vanya shuddered and closed her fingers convulsively around the corrugated sides of the can. “I think there’s something wrong with me,” she said. Something bright and sparkling pressed in at the sides of her vision.

“If it’s withdrawal,” Five said, “we’ll just have to ride it out. I’m with you. You’ll be alright, eventually.” Vanya closed her eyes and forced herself to stop thinking about suffocating to death under the heavy weight of those clouds, and chose, moment by moment, to believe him.

On the third day they found new and more practical clothes in the ruins of a department store, and if any other voices spoke to Five they were only in his own head, and he ignored them. They found her thick-soled work boots more fit for walking, and cotton wraps and fat tubes of treacly ointments for the red rising boils already chafing at the backs of her heels, and pants to cover the bony knees her schoolgirl skirt exposed. Everything was battered grey with plaster dust from caved-in ceilings. Inside the dark still tomb of the store, an unfathomable wind ruffled through Five’s hair with every clattering footstep against the scuffed linoleum flooring. When she looked up from paging through a rack of crumpled sweaters he was paused in the act of arranging things in the pit of the wagon, looking at her strangely.

“What?” Vanya asked. “Did I do something?”

In such short a time, Five’s face had grown gaunt and dour; there was a familiar frown pulling at the edges of his mouth now. “I don’t know,” he said, in the tone of someone trying to recall something important that had just slipped his mind. He ran his hand back through his hair again and again, trying to smooth it down. Then he said, “Just take whatever you like, and let’s go.”

They kept walking. They were like animals, mindless and insensate and dumb, following the whims of their feet and stomachs, eating when they wanted to, sleeping when they wanted to, following the chemical instructions of bodies that new instinctively how to survive when civilized brains did not. For her part, Vanya slept little. The nights were as deep and as dark and as bottomless as the inside of an abandoned well, full up with claustrophobic boredom, but she couldn’t make her racing mind be quiet. Sprawled out on a pile of stolen clothes to insulate against the stony and unforgiving earth she would curl up on her side and try to even out her breathing, time it to the steady metronome of Five’s.

That night there was no moon, no stars, but something threw blue shadows like refracted neon across Five’s pale skin, which meant there must have been light somewhere; it glinted in the water of Five’s eyes when he opened them. “Vanya,” he whispered, a prayer and a curse, and her name made the air shimmer silver between them. Her nerves still felt jittery, had been getting worse day by day, something putrid building up like a boil under her skin that would lance itself messily sooner or later. “What, _exactly_ , was your medicine for?”

“Dad didn’t say,” she whispered back, unsure why they were bothering to keep quiet with no one else around but grateful for it. Her voice sounded impossibly loud. She remembered sitting on the high steel examination table in the basement of the house with her father in his white coat peering searchingly into her eyes, the metal pressing icily against the naked backs of her thighs where her skirt rode up and she had hooked her knees over the edge, swinging her feet out into space. Vanya had felt very special sitting down there, where her brothers and sister went to get patched up and put back together after missions, reassembled into better, brighter configurations. Like it had been an honor and a privilege to sit there with cool jelly sticking electric nodes to her temples and Hargreeves watching her hawkishly, scribbling down dictations on blood pressure and serotonin levels. “It’s a sedative, I think. He said I was too excitable.”

Five’s expression held some unnamable anger in it. “That old bastard,” he spat, a little louder, and the sound was _everywhere,_ drawing ruts in the dirt, vibrating through her skin and amplified by it. He sat up and caught her hands in his, dragging her upright with him, and even in her startlement, Vanya wasn’t afraid.

“What are you saying?” she murmured. “That you think I might be special?”

“I’ve always known you were special,” Five said smugly. “Now we have a certain sort of proof. Think about it-- where else have you seen this kind of light before?”

Vanya examined the backs of her own hands, blue like moonlight, like the electrical discharge of whatever elemental emulsion field Five passed through when he had hopped from place to place. “Oh,” she said, and something like anger, the cousin of wonder, filled up her seizing chest. If she thought back hard enough, if she focused, she could remember an iron room and a table full of broken glasses and pain and fear and anesthesia, and she clenched Five’s hands harder, until she could feel his heart there, too.

In the coming weeks there would be real anger, every stage of grief rapidly cycled through; some nights she would cry herself to sleep until she felt Five edge in close and draw a mothworn blanket up over both of them, and sometimes she would laugh for no reason just with the joy of it as the power flowed through her like starlight from her fingertips, and all of this as around them pieces of architecture crumbled and fell. It would feel like a bad dream, and like she was really awake for the first time. But just then, that night, they lay down under the hidden stars and the air rang around them with the delicate crystal music of a finger running around the rim of a wine glass, and Vanya let it sing her to sleep.

Eventually, after a long while, the clouds thinned and fell and the sun came out again, shining on Five and Vanya and the splendor of bleak infinity. And then there was just-- the rest of their lives.

\---

Strange eccentricities grew up in them like vines taking the form of their trellis at the end of the world, curious paranoias, unusual survival mechanisms. Five had always been a little odd, and he indulged it lavishly by demanding, among other things, that they keep track of the passage of time, marking off every day and hour, in tune with the motion of the Earth on its axis and the turn of the year. “Is that really important now?” Vanya had asked without judgment, just wondering, as Five had wrapped the cloth of his blazer around his hand before using it to smash through the glass front of a newspaper box that first day, hungry for clues and a date that would fix them somewhere in the vast sea of wasted time.

April 1st, 2019. He read it aloud, then rolled his scavenged paper up and stuck it under an arm. “Yes,” he said, shortly, and Vanya decided that she believed him. “Someday, probably-- shit, maybe I could get us back. But to calculate the distance to where we’re going I’ll have to know exactly, _precisely_ , down to the minute and the second if possible, where we’re coming from.” A lot of digital things had stopped working when the rest of the man-made world turned off, the probable result of an EMP blast, Five said, which could come along hand in hand with nuclear detonations, so they knocked off the ruins of a jeweler’s shop as soon as they could and came away with an antique manual pocket watch, the dented brass as heavy as a heart in her hands.

“That’s for you,” Five said. “Keep track of it. Don’t ever let it stop.” Vanya didn’t mind. She liked the weight of it pinned safe in her breast pocket, liked the loud slow tick of its hands, something else autonomous and moving in a still, silent world. Liked, too, the ritual of winding it, meditatively cranking the dial as they walked aimlessly from gas station to convenience store, makeshift bunker to bunker, scavenging sacks full of cans and new dust-choked clothes and knives and pots and most precious of all, water. She was always thirsty, and her mouth was always dry, and her legs always hurt, and she was always winding the watch, minding the journal where Five carefully numbered their days.

So she always knew when they were missing the meaningless rituals of Christmases, New Year’s, the Fourth of July, every holiday that held as much practical significance for them now as it had before, which was to say none. On their birthdays they ate the last of the Twinkies, stale straight from the wrapping, the slight banana flavoring leaving an aftertaste of arsenic, and sipped instant coffee from a dwindling supply of judiciously portioned out powder that tasted more and more like plaster with every passing day.

So she knew that they were fifteen (fifteen and five months, two weeks, three days, not to get more precise than that) when the Handler first appeared to them. They were in the rubble of the library, a solid building once poured from strong concrete that had weathered the blast that leveled most of the city better than, well, most of the city had been equipped to, its walls a safe place to get out of the blinding sun or stiff whipping winds. One moment they were alone and the next she was there, blinked into utterly improbable existence framed by a desolate doorway that opened into everywhere. Boundaries like doors were a pitiful human formality now, especially to her; amid the scrubby wreckage she glowed like an angel of dubious mercy, as shiny and clean as a bottle-blonde Cadillac, equally as cold and mechanical.

She smiled her red lipsticked smile at the pair of them, mostly at Five, and for a moment no one moved. Five had been cleaning his gun, something he did compulsively at least three times a day, and Vanya saw his fingers twitch towards it crossed over his lap, fancied she could see the elaborate equations of time and distance and probability unfolding behind his eyes: how quickly he could grab for the stock, swing it towards the woman if she took another step. They should have been glad to see her, Vanya thought vaguely, another human presence in an empty world, but all that settled over them was dread and a feeling of unfathomable _wrongness_ that the woman projected.

“You see her?” Five asked, not taking his eyes off the stranger, and Vanya nodded shallowly. Louder, “Who the hell are you?”

“Gracious,” the woman drawled, as if sincerely surprised. “Is this how you welcome guests into your _lovely_ home, Five?”

Five sat up a little straighter. “How do you know my name?”

“Oh, we know everything about you.” The woman crossed and uncrossed her elegant legs, the soft sound of nylon siding over nylon making Vanya shiver. “You’re going to be a very important man. You’ll do big things.” She took a step forward and Five let her, and in fact let her march all the way across the small courtyard to them. His hands jerked when she drew in close enough that a gun would no longer have anything but an awkward range, and then when she reached in, quick and deadly as a rattlesnake striking, to smooth her hand down his cheek and the sharp corner of his jaw, drawing her fingertips up the line of his chin to tip his head back.

“What in the--”

Her smile melted into a pout of disappointment and she snapped her hand away just as quickly, withdrew. “But you’re not ready yet,” she said, her gaze darting from Five to Vanya, back to Five, not deigning to linger long. “Not ripe. What a shame, you’re so _cute_ like this.”

Five bristled, showing teeth without smiling. “Don’t touch me,” he demanded. “Next time you touch me, you lose that hand. What are you _talking_ about?”

She chuckled in a way that drew nails down the inside of Vanya’s skull and rifled through the pages of her book like a strong and sudden wind. Five’s gaze flicked to Vanya, which in the morse code of their nonverbal knowledge of each other meant _Are you okay?_ which meant, more or less, _Are you in control?_ Vanya nodded, even though the part of her that had now been socialized mostly by living in the wilds wanted to make the woman’s blood boil, wanted to crumple her up into sinew and bone and make her _go away_.

“Now that’s more like the Five I know,” the woman said.

“You don’t know him at all,” Vanya told her, surprising herself. “I think it would be better if you left now.”

The woman turned her poisonous gaze upon Vanya, the sharpness of that stare pinning her to the wall like a desiccated butterfly in a collector’s box. “How sweet,” she said to Five, eyes lazily half-lidded with all the smarm and decorum of a predator toying with something small and vulnerable. “Playing house with your sister. I’ll drop by again later.”

And she disappeared in a coruscating halo of pale blue light, vacuumed up out of the world. “Maybe we’re finally going crazy,” Vanya suggested hopefully after she’d gone.

“No,” Five said, staring fiercely into the nothingness where she had been as though he could divine her secrets in the dust motes. “She jumped. For sure.” He licked at his dry lips. “If she does come back again, maybe I can figure out how she did it.”

Annoyance curdled like a candle flame in the pit of Vanya’s stomach, but she said nothing. It seemed simpler that way.

\---

The food started to run out a little before their nineteenth birthday. Vanya had long since made a habit of checking the expiration dates on cans of baked beans and creamed corn, noting with interest as the invisible timers there ran down, how many days were left until nothing would be good anymore. “Those dates are just suggestions,” Five would say, popping the ragged-edged tops off of aluminum cans of Campbell’s soup whose oily contents had separated in long travel, a grainy fog of thick chicken stock lurking under half an inch of less cloudy water. “So the companies wouldn’t be liable if you don’t like it. It’s fine, really-- go on, eat.” This proclaimed with an ironclad confidence that the inevitable miasma of the soup, the limp vegetables and tasteless lumps of meat that didn’t so much melt as disintegrate in your mouth, immediately undermined.

And then all the dates had gone by, and they were still eating old soup.

Five and Vanya had looked all over with searching eyes made keen by burgeoning desperation for anything beginning to grow, any other life beginning to peek cautiously out of its hiding place towards the sun, but among the things that had spoiled was, apparently, all the topsoil, which was washed-out grey and dusty and blew away in the wind. There weren’t even rats in the ruins, no skittering of clever little paws or squeakings in the broken walls to weave through the melody of the song in her head; there had been blackflies, at first, fat and round as ripe blueberries that hovered in dense clouds around the city, but they hadn’t lasted longer than a season. You needed meat for maggots, and there wasn’t any meat anymore.

But there were cockroaches. What they ate, where they came from, was a mystery, but it was obvious that they were not only surviving but thriving, replicating themselves with multitudinous abandon; turn over any stone and you’d find them there, scrambling madly to get back to the dark and the damp away from the light. They were there in the ruins of grocery stores and pantries that Five and Vanya had itinerantly commuted between for the last half decade, nomads moving from cache to cache and wandering off when the bounty ran dry. Canned food did spoil, especially in the unbelievable Venusian heat of an irradiated planet. Twinkies had a shelf life that disappointed their reputation. Eventually, every new place they went to yielded only mold and stale rot.

On the third day of half-rations, the last of something that had once been beef stew but now resembled strained mud, Five caught a cockroach. He deftly plucked it from a twisted piece of formless iron it had been brazenly perched on, waving its feelers jauntily in the gloaming of twilight, and he let its pointy little feet scramble over his calloused hand, tipping it from palm to back to palm again. When it opened its back and tried to fly away on hideous gossamer wings he pinched it between thumb and forefinger until there was a crack, and then it was still as a stone again save for a scraggly twitching leg.

“Insects were a delicacy in many African and South American cultures,” he said, attempting to convince her of his nonchalance as he held the tiny carcass up to the light and appraised it with the eye of a connoisseur.

“You wouldn’t,” said Vanya, though nothing would have surprised her anymore. In truth, she’d never had a deep capacity for it.

He shrugged. “It’s valuable protein. We’re all skin and bone.”

They were both practical people. She ate the cockroach, crunchy shell and all.

A week later, Five broke into someone’s wine cellar during their routine scavenging. Vanya could tell he’d found something good from the excited cry he made while she was wandering around what had once been the upstairs running sun-faded floral patterned curtains between her fingers just to feel something soft for once, and she hurried down to join him. That particular ossuary vault was row after row of dark glass bottles, their peeling labels marked in tasteful burgundy and gold and proclaiming the pedigree of vineyard and year, and he filled his arms with them gleefully. “Help me find a corkscrew,” he said as she came down the unsteady stairs, “and then we’ll have ourselves a time.”

The cellar was hot and musty and damp, but it felt quiet and private, tucked away from the elements and the scouring winds. “What day is it?” Five asked, trying to struggle with a knife and a cork and maintain his dignity at the same time. Vanya felt around in her pocket, touching the watch and the hard little lump of Allison’s locket, and consulted the book.

“October 1st, 2025,” she read, squinting at the columns of squashed dates in Five’s precise hand.

He held his arms open to indicate the bounty of the cellar, drunk already off his own scathing wit. “And look! The universe has conspired to give us all this.” The cork came free of the bottleneck with an anemic pop and he took the first long swig, sucking it down like a man lost seven years in the desert handed a canteen of fresh sweet water for the first time. “Bracing,” he said, wiping his mouth off wastefully on the back of his hand, and he passed the bottle to Vanya.

The wine, like everything else, was at least half spoiled. It was vinegary and red as old blood and it bit at her tongue, but at least it was a different kind of unpleasant and fairly soon half the bottle was gone, Five working on cracking into another. She took a first sip just to try, and then a second mouthful because she could-- the wonder of that freedom was still dawning on her day by day, even after so much time had passed, flouting the part of her that still saw the decrepit husk of Reginald Hargreeves around every corner ready to rap her knuckles for the insolence of thinking herself for once instant autonomous.

Vanya couldn’t tell if she was glad he was dead, along with everyone else.

She had never been lonely, at least there was that. Their internment at the end of the world with each other was serendipitous, Vanya and Five, because probably any other pair of siblings would have strangled each other by now, sick to death of their single cellmate. But Vanya and Five got along, and even long after they’d run out of anything to say to each other their silences were companionable, not empty but full, and even when they argued the fights were vicious and ugly but short, without fatality, and the sentiment never lingered long.

With the wine loosening her tongue, nestled down in a murky corner of someone else’s cellar with Five tucked close at her side and a bottle between them, Vanya found some new things to say. “What do you miss most?” she asked, feeling the alcohol hum and buzz in her blood. The wine wasn’t very alcoholic, especially after years of decomposition, but on a shriveled empty stomach and without any tolerance it was steadily taking a sledgehammer to her consciousness, and she had to lean against the clammy brick wall and Five’s shoulder to keep from tipping over.

His eyes were closed and his breathing was even and shallow; if it hadn’t been for his fingers drumming lethargically against the broad side of the emptying bottle he might have been sleeping. Five had all the same gestures of trust and affection as a housecat, something only barely domesticated. He was quiet for a long time, giving her nothing to spin her power out of. It was a very maudlin question, she supposed, and one he might find tiresome. “Music,” he said.

Vanya was surprised. She said so. “I never thought you had a particular interest in it.”

Five shrugged. “Not all music,” he amended. “Those polka records Dad used to put on in his study-- awful stuff. Just terrible. But the music you made, I liked that.”

Vanya felt her heart give a great slow shudder in her chest, thawed from long hibernation through nuclear winter. It was probably all the wine. “I wasn’t very good,” she said.

“You were extraordinary,” he told her firmly, slurring around the softer edges of his words, “because you liked it. Sometimes I’d come downstairs while you were practicing, just in the other room, didn’t want to make you self-conscious. I loved listening to that. It was beautiful.” He sighed out all the breath from his lungs. “There were so few beautiful things in our world, even then.”

Something flowered open in her, rare and delicate and fragile, like the kind of plant that had only bloomed once every fifteen years. Vanya examined it with calm, inevitable acceptance.

Would it be so bad, she wondered, if she loved Five? Not in the way that she was supposed to love him, comfortable and supportive and at arm’s length, but the way people who were _in love_ loved each other, with the ferocity of fire hungering for oxygen to burn. Allison and Luther had always been getting punished for it, each stolen moment of simple affection a blight in their father’s cold and unforgiving eyes, because their father had wanted all their obedience and adoration to go only to him. But here they were, alone now in the ended world, the reverse of Adam and Eve packing up and turning out the lights on humanity. In the stories about the old times, the Biblical times and the days of deep antiquity before, brothers and sisters were always becoming mothers and fathers-- because those were the only options that presented themselves, if those rare creatures wanted to pair off, if the gods and monsters didn’t want to be alone.

She and Five were certainly young gods, as close to it as anyone mortal could get, even if her talents were dangerous and unpredictable and his had deserted him. It wasn’t just that he was the only option now; it had always been him for her, her for him, thick as thieves in that big empty joyless house, sharing the secrets that were only precious to each other, stealing what little love there was to go around. She’d seen him go from a baby-faced child to an awkward spindly teenager with too many elbows to, suddenly, a young man-- war-wearied and scruffy, but a man, a foot unfairly taller than her with big long-fingered hands and wide shoulders and a full mouth, wet and red with wine.

“Do you want to know something?” she asked him.

“I want to know _everything_ ,” he said, without opening his eyes. “About the world and the stars and space-time and you. Tell me.”

“It’s a secret,” she said. Vanya swilled the last marshy backwash of the wine around in the bottom of the bottle and contemplated opening another one, but couldn’t make herself move. She felt warm and tingly and good, mostly, and the world was singing. “But even after everything, I’m glad I’m here with you.”

He tilted his head on a boneless neck and it lolled heavy onto her shoulder, his breath wafting hot and sickly humid against her skin. “Hmm,” he said, perhaps disappointed by the mundanity of her confession.

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

“No,” Five told her. He pawed for her hand and held it limply at the wrist, fingers tapped to her pulse point, reassuringly vital. “I think I know what you mean.” He nuzzled his thin cheek into the ball of her shoulder. After a moment, before she could think of what else she wanted to say, he was softly snoring-- and Vanya was alone in the primordial dark.

\---

Time passed after that revelation, and Vanya learned to live with it; assimilated it somewhere deep and secret inside herself, where it could only hurt her if she chose on any given day, when Five looked at her too long or smiled in a certain way, to remember it.

The one thing they had a lot of was time. Time vast and wide and deep as the distant dead sea, time unspooling and unfurling directionlessly. Time you could drown in. Five spent a lot of it thinking about time, and talking about time, the ways to bunch up and puncture the fabric of it, all the things he’d like to do if they were successful: make a real cup of coffee. See a movie. Steal their father’s car and take a joyride down by the wharf. The apparition of the blonde woman came up more frequently in conversation than Vanya would have liked, an itch deep in his brilliant brain that Five couldn’t scratch.

“If she’s not like us,” he would say, “then she’s figured out some trick of time manipulation, and if she’s figured it out that sure as hell means that I can too. Reverse engineer it, maybe. But if she _is_ like us, then who in the blue fuck is she?”

Vanya didn’t have an answer for that aside from vague, caustic resentment. It wasn’t that she enjoyed the apocalypse, per se, the hunger and the thirst and the exhaustion that became an ordinary way of life, but it was equally true to say that she didn’t miss a whole lot about the way their world had been, either. There hadn’t been a lot in her life to miss-- just a big empty nothing, the metaphorical version of the bleak nothing that surrounded them now. At least here she had Five, and all of Five’s undivided attention.

Except when he was rambling on about the Handler, and the possibilities she represented.

The other thing they had a lot of was books. Much of the old Argyle Public Library had been underground, and from its spacious disheveled catacombs Vanya pulled countless treasures, time capsules of places that had once been real, or real enough: _Huckleberry Finn_ and _The Great Gatsby_ and _Slaughterhouse-Five_. ‘Listen,’ she read, squinting to make out the smudging ink where Five had written his own subtext in between the lines, marking up the brittle yellow paper with increasingly frantic equations. The pinning and measuring of space-time’s fraying fabric via complex integers was his obsession, and his only hobby outside of her. ‘Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time…’

After every few pages she would conscientiously pause to crank the pocket watch. She was sitting in the shade of the library foyer, where all their things were, the rusting red wagon and the stacks of books and the army surplus cots and jugs of condensed water and piles of unseasonable winter coats. It was August 19th of 2027, for all that designation mattered anymore to anybody but Five, and the sun was blasting down from a bleakly cloudless sky. In the near distance she could hear the intermittent _pop, pop… pop_ of Five’s gun going off, followed by the hollow tinkling of empty cans falling backwards off a chunk of rebar and concrete. That was his _other_ hobby. He would set them up over and over in a shallow row and take aim down the line like a kid with an airsoft gun at a carnival booth. When he was done he would go over and set them up again, new holes and all. He claimed it helped him think, but more probably it was just something to do.

“At least it’ll keep your aim sharp,” Vanya had said one day, watching him, with the deep upturned solemnity of a joke. “You know, if the cockroaches ever rise up against us.”

The silence when the shooting stopped was absolute, and the rasp of her fingers carefully turning the paper did not fill it up. She expected any moment to hear the familiar crunch over gravel of his boots approaching, maybe accompanied by a low and tuneless whistle, but when long echoing moments had passed and Five failed to reappear over some parapet of wasting garbage Vanya shut her book and tucked it away and went to go find him.

Five had set his makeshift shooting range up along a stretch of road that was pockmarked with deep, hellish potholes from seasons of stressful expansion and contraction in the winter cold. He was about a hundred yards up the street, broad back to her, making hissing whispered conversation with the malodorous angel of death that Vanya recognized as their shared delusion. In silence any sound carried, and sound was Vanya’s friend.

“Just consider it,” the woman was crooning. She had starred in all of Vanya’s nightmares since her first appearance, a ghost that she peered around corners and into ruins to catch a glimpse of, sure she was haunting them with a revenant hunger. Haunting Five, at least, watching through shards of broken window, ready to strike. And now here she was again, and Vanya wanted to scream. “I’m giving you the opportunity of a lifetime, darling. A chance to really make your life count.”

Five had slung his gun over the back of his shoulder, and Vanya wished that she could see his face. “If I went with you,” he said, “what exactly is it that I would be doing?”

“Making sure that all is as it should be.” The woman’s artificial smile was aimed at Vanya over his shoulder, triumphant and haughty. “Working to make the world a better place.” She touched his cheek again, and one of Five’s cans exploded abruptly into aluminum shrapnel. Five whipped around to face her, without guilt, a short red line oozing along the corner of his jaw where a piece of metal had caught him, propelled by the force of its atoms vibrating apart.

“You’ve caught me at a bad time,” he said, flapping his wrist dismissively in the Handler’s direction, and he soldier-marched himself stiffly down the street in the direction of home, towards the place where Vanya was waiting. “But I’ll think about it.”

They walked back to camp in silence, side by side, and Vanya let the rage bubble and simmer in her stomach. The body was an instrument, always in motion, singing in thin strings of muscle, drums of tight connective tissue, a whole orchestra of pumping chambers and wind whistling through pipes, and she could turn his against him easy as the flick of a thought. She didn’t want to. He was her brother, and she loved him and needed him with an urgency that was wound through every fiber of her, but there was something inherently satisfying in the idea of breaking that vile woman’s favorite toy before she ever got to play with it. What Vanya _wanted_ was to carve her name in him, burn her claim in so there could be no mistaking where Five belonged.

What she wanted, really, was for him to turn and cup her cheek just like that, with such an absurd and transgressive tenderness, and kiss her until all the breath was gone from her lungs. She wanted him to want to, without being told.

“Did you find out how she does it?” she asked, and they stopped walking. “The time travel. Whatever it is that she does.”

He shook his head. “I might, if I went with her. I keep thinking that there must be some sort of mechanism for it.” Five examined her face briefly, and Vanya wondered what he read there that he continued, “I get the feeling you don’t much care for that idea.”

Vanya grabbed for his hand and turned it so that his pale wrist was exposed and twisted upward; he was much taller than her, had grown into an imposing frame while malnourishment had made Vanya pretty much the same size and shape she’d been when they’d arrived, but she could still do things like that, make demands of him, because he let her. Hargreeves’ tattoo was still there, bleached by sun and time to a deep olive color, no longer pitch black and fresh. She liked to look at it from time to time, poking out from under the cuff of his grubby shirt, to remind herself of that bond, as though as long as the mark was stamped into his flesh he couldn’t forget her. Their father had meant it a mark of his ownership, branding his children like chattel, all the ones he’d had some use for and hadn’t wanted to lose.

“Do you remember the day you got this?” she asked.

“Of course,” Five said. “It hurt like anything. And then I found you on the stairs after, and you said--”

He’d gotten his done before Ben, and while the others were huddled together licking each other’s wounds he’d slunk off to where she was lurking, popping up too quickly in the space beside Vanya’s shoulder for her to roll down her sleeve fast enough to hide the smudging, not-quite-dry marker strokes that sat in indictment on her skin. And she had said, “I’m sorry,” not really knowing what she was apologizing for, except that he had his fist clenched white-knuckled at his hip, and it seemed guiltily offensive, caught out in it, to envy his pain. “It’s silly. I know. I just-- you’re all always going off without me. I’m not even a part of it.”

And Five had said, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. That mark doesn’t make you my family, Number Seven.” She’d recoiled, used to weathering such rebukes but never from him, and he’d caught her wrist, darting in rapid as a snake to steal a kiss, his dry lips pressed to the high arch of her cheekbone, almost too quick to register. Then like smoke evaporating in the still air he was gone again. “You are, regardless.”

In the future that would come Vanya brought his wrist to her lips and pressed a kiss across the faded mark, returning it. “You can’t leave me here,” she said, and this time it wasn’t a wailing imperative-- just a statement of truth, that the universe had organized it as such to make it impossible for him to go without her. There was iron ringing in her words, hanging like daggers in the air around them.

Five flexed and clenched his fingers, but he didn’t take his hand back. “I know,” he said. “But if I can figure it out-- if I can go _anywhere_ in time, I could be right back. You wouldn’t be alone long. Milliseconds, at most.”

“It wouldn’t be just a second,” Vanya said. “Look where we are, Five. Look how well that worked out for you.” She took a deep shuddering breath. Vanya had always suspected that Five meant more to her than she meant to him, and she’d long since killed and buried the small bitter hurt of that, shoved it down deep. “Do you trust her?” she asked.

“I’m not that stupid.”

“Do you trust me?”

Five looked at her. She regarded him. The hard years had not been kind to either of them, she supposed, his scraggly beard and her tangled hair the result of living just to live, and she wondered what she looked like through his eyes, if there were lines carved by weariness in her face. Five was still handsome, still recognizably himself, still the boy who’d made her blush in secret moments she never spoke of, even in her own head. “Always,” he said.

She kissed him.

It was awkward at first to negotiate. Vanya had never done anything so bold before, not since the day she’d reached for his hand and wound up in the future, and it was easier to make grand gestures when you were of a similar height. When she leaned up he had to meet her in the middle, his hand rough and weathered like stone cupping her jaw, the pad of his thumb swiping fondly across the ridge of her cheekbone as their mouths met. Somewhere in there she had released his wrist and that arm came down and around, circling loosely around her waist to rest his hand possessive at the small of her back, directing her closer as they shuffled together, as if they were dancing. His lips were warm, and he used the slick pressure of his tongue to open her mouth, evincing a hunger for touch that Vanya wouldn’t have expected of a man who so valued his personal space. The whole world was music.

Swirls of dead dust rose lazily in the air around their ankles, caught in the eddies of her power as the sound of their hearts came into clear focus. The eye of the sun burned down on them like a spotlight, beading sweat at the back of her neck as a low warmth simmered in her belly. “Extraordinary,” he murmured, panting humid breath against her wet lips, her cheek, the side of her neck.

“Stay,” she said again, and this time when she kissed him she pulled him down with her fingers hooked through the front of his shirt, hands in his hair, and they scrabbled with clumsy enthusiasm at each other and all the helpless adolescent abandon they could muster. He cinched his arm tighter around her middle, crushing her to his chest, and in that instant she was almost sure that if he tried they could go anywhere, appear in Central Park or Times Square at the end of the last great war or safe at home in his old familiar bedroom with everything just the way they’d left it. But then, everyone thinks their first love is revolutionary.

“I won’t go anywhere without you,” he promised. “Never, not ever again.”

It was a short walk the rest of the way back to camp, and they didn’t take their time with it. After so long without it, Vanya just wanted the comforting pressure of his arm around her and his chest to her chest, squeezing out the doubt and loneliness; he seemed to agree. After several steps he caught her up off her feet and spun her around and a flash of light seared through her vision, and when the arc of that motion ended they were tumbling down in a giggling pile on top of his bedroll, legs tangled together-- power enough for one short jump, riding the pure physical high of that giddy emotion.

She wanted to touch him, and be touched. She wanted to be alive, really alive, in the filthy and base and animal way that people who loved each other were, alive how you could only be with someone’s hand heavy on the top of your skull and pushing down with their cock in your mouth-- or with your face bracketed by soft thighs, or on your back with another body grinding you down into the earth. Vanya didn’t have a lot of time for sentiment, but she loved him, and she wanted that.

She stroked his chest, from the open hem of his stained shirt collar all the way down to the place where the hem of it had pulled up, exposing softer skin and the tight smooth musculature of his stomach that fluttered involuntarily under the brief brush of her fingertips. His answering grin was smug and feral, but conspiratorial and bone-deep pleased. Vanya didn’t like the idea of using herself as a bartering chip to get him to stay, to tether him to this bleak and unforgiving place, but she liked even less the thought of him going, accruing untold years and adventures, even if he returned to pick her up before she had time to blink. They were equal now, in every way, and would never be unequal again.

“Let me show you something,” she said.

They’d seen each other naked before, in contexts devoid of hope or innuendo-- washing out clothes in the swampy water of the bay, dressing wounds, situations in which their bodies were sexless tools, all the pleasure beaten out of them by familiarity and exhaustion. There was a new cast to it now, different with his fingers helping hers ease chipped buttons from their holes, skinning his shirt off over bony shoulders to expose the sharp jut of his clavicle through papery skin. She could see and feel the bones of his ribs buttressing his thin chest as she drew her hands down his naked sides, letting the sun warm them, but he was the most handsome man she had ever seen, and she flattened her palms to the firm planes of his chest, pushing him over backwards to land with a thump in the dust.

Vanya wanted to ask him, _Would you still want this, if we’d grown up back home? If there were other options?_ But knew herself enough to know that no answer would please her, and anyway, it didn’t matter. What had happened had happened, and they could only live in the world where they were; and in this world, he worked his fingers adoringly through her hair as she knelt between his open thighs and it fell in dark curling waves in her face, hands pulling at his secondhand belt. Even though they had no short supply of it, she didn’t really see the point of wasting any more time.

“Vanya,” he said, somehow slow and urgent all at once as she pulled down the catching zip and he rolled his hips up, letting her slide the stiff denim fabric halfway down his thighs. “You don’t have to… suck me off, just to make me stay.”

“I know,” she said, kissing wet and open-mouthed above the shallow arch of his hip as her hand dipped sweaty-palmed but sure into the slit front of his boxers. “So shut up.”

For once in his life, very briefly, Five did.

She ran her hand over him slowly at first, feeling out the weight of his cock in her hand, and focused, as she had learned to do, on the sound of his breathing as it grew hitched and erratic, until the world narrowed down to the single fine point of Five, and his voice, and his hand in her hair, and his flushed-hot skin getting slick beneath her palm. His hips rolled up again, bucking impatient into her grip, and then his hand slipped from the crown of her head downward, finding purchase with his bitten nails digging into her shoulder through the flannel of her shirt, then lower, brazenly cupping her breast and digging in there as well. “And if I want to touch you, too?” he grumbled.

“In a minute.” Vanya kissed again at his quivering stomach, then pushed the worn-loose elastic band of his boxers down and kissed the head of his cock, too, having never felt so powerful as when he groaned deep from the back of his throat like he’d been wounded. Curious, she swiped her tongue across the tip, tasting bitter salt and his skin, and she drew him deeper into her mouth. She felt him hitch a leg up, crook it awkwardly across her lower back to hold her there, and she took pity on him enough to take his hand in her free hand, guiding it under her shirt in response. His shaking fingers found the hard stiff peak of her nipple and she groaned back to him, the vibrations of her tongue and cheeks hollowed against his shaft setting him off, an uncontrollable feedback loop.

Nothing in their world was soft or tender, but at least they could be tender with each other, for a little while. With every push Vanya could feel him bumping at the back of her throat, thick enough to stretch her lips and set a burning ache of new exertion in her jaw and still have enough left to hold in her hand, and she wanted him in her, impossibly. Among the many things that had expired were, probably, all the drug store condoms, and neither of them were stupid. But there was a strange comfort in having him in her mouth, his hands all over her wherever he could reach, trying to take enough to touch her nose to his belly. They were out in the open, in the sunlight, exposed to the world, and Vanya almost hoped that the Handler would choose then to come back for Five, for as embarrassing as it would be to get caught with saliva and streaks of his precum dripping messily from the corner of her mouth. At least then she would _know_ where Five belonged: with Vanya, his sister, accomplice since birth, and Vanya alone.

She coughed shallowly when he came, hips shoving up with sharp restraint, fingers tightening at her until his grip hurt in a way that made her tight and wet between her thighs, whining like he was dying. It didn’t taste great, but it wasn’t bad, either, and Vanya swallowed without thinking before tucking him thoughtfully back into his pants. Vanya loved him, and it wasn’t bad at all.

“Five?” she said as he slowly recovered and reached for her, still hungry, still searching, even if his body wanted to be limp and lethargic and boneless. “I’m glad I’m here.”

\---

They grew old together. They were owed that much.

Five and Vanya Hargreeves lived in the ruins of the library, and he filled its crumbling stones with lines of incomprehensible code, swapping out variables, trying to reverse engineer a magic trick. They ate bugs and drank boiled water and explored what there was left of the city, less and less of it every year, and huddled together in winter and cursed the blistering sun all summer, and they loved each other. That was the whole of it, that love expanding to fill the entire world, because what else was there? It was a monotonous life, filled with hunger and boredom, but a life in which Vanya was allowed to be strong and sane and treasured, and she considered that she was about as happy as she could possibly be. The Handler never showed up again.

Until one bright day in their sixties, when everything was starting to wind down. Every part of her hurt, again and suddenly. Her joints were stiff on wet mornings and dry evenings, her back ached, she knew Five felt the same but wouldn’t say it. All the aspirin had long since lost its potency too, nothing but dusty placebo pills, no better than a wish and a prayer.

And the Handler appeared to them under half a broken arch. “Well?” she said. “Have I given you enough time to consider the proposition?”

Five reached out and took Vanya’s gnarled, liver-spotted hand in his and squeezed, as they had discussed. “We’re ready,” he said, placing special stress and emphasis on the plural pronoun. “But we’ve got a couple of conditions, first.”

The first thing they did was make love in a real bed, on a hardtack mattress with scratchy sheets somewhere deep in the Commission’s sprawling offices, and then they went to work.

\---

It ended the way so many things in their childhood had begun, with Five in the basement kitchen beneath the big house fixing them both a sandwich. There was enough tacky peanut butter left in the bottom of the jar for two, his and hers, and a snowfall scattering of puffy hot chocolate-grade marshmallows overtop. The blood and mud and dust had all been washed from his hands and they were perfect again, tiny and soft, still deft with a butter knife. While she ate, taking her time to really savor it and experience every bite, the texture of the peanut butter, the sweetness of the sugar, Five upended every cabinet he could reach and cursed with dire pronouncement.

“The old man fucks us one last time from beyond the grave,” he said, tipping out an empty canister onto the counter. “No goddamned coffee.”

They did the only sensible thing, and took the car.

She and Five had been everywhere together in a short span of time that lasted forever, seen the slender stately columns of Roman coliseums and great resplendent gardens overflowing with bounty and the Swiss Alps and a president’s brains splattered across the back of a slick black convertible, so the lights of the city vibrant and alive again were no longer as novel as she once might have thought they would be, but tooling down the familiar streets in their father’s serviceable antique car gave her the feeling of being driven home through the night after a long trip, swimming in the suddenly overlarge plush leather seat and liable to nod off against the window while the riot and color of streetlamps and neon signs streaked by. It was the same feeling she’d had as a child stepping last down the ladder out of Reginald Hargreeves’ private plane, having skipped over ten timezones back from Paris or London or wherever. Five drifted them into the lot outside Griddy’s Donuts, where the lights were still on at two in the morning as they’d always been and would always be, and the click of the parking brake locking in jolted her the rest of the way awake.

Vanya was pleased to find it still gave her the same secret thrill to hear the chime above the door welcoming them as they pushed in, just the two of them, tinged and tempered with a cloying blanket of nostalgia now. Just Five and Vanya, renewedly age thirteen, sneaking out for pastries and coffee, enjoying each other’s company in the wan hours of the night when no one could judge them. The shop was empty save for one exhausted, balding middle-aged man, and they sat down at the far end of the sticky counter together, leaving him to his eclair and coffee in peace.

It was the same brittle waitress in the same pepto bismol-pink smock and apron that it had always been, and there was a bone-deep kind of relief in realizing that no matter what, some things never changed.

Most of the lights were off in the restaurant, everything winding down for the evening, but it was warm in there and smelled like sugar with antiseptic cleanser underneath. “Well, you were right,” Five sighed while they waited for his coffee and her donut to arrive on perfect small saucers. “The equations were off.” He glowered sullenly at the swinging door with its round porthole window where the perennial waitress had disappeared. “ _And what do the kids want?_ ” he sneered in a mocking sing-song parody of thoughtless customer service. “At least five more _years_ of that, can you imagine?”

Vanya hummed thoughtfully and the electric floodlamps dotting the ceiling hummed with her. “It’s not so bad,” she said, letting her hand find his on top of the counter and laying it there, winding their fingers loosely and carelessly together. “We had a wonderful life together, forty years, twenty-one thousand moments; every one was precious to me. And how lucky are we, that we get to do it all again?”

He smiled, and kissed her on the cheek, and the little bell rang to announce the entry of someone new. With everything that happened after Five never got to have his coffee, but that was alright. There would be plenty of time for coffee later.

For coffee, and whatever else they wanted.

**Author's Note:**

>  _"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."_  
>  \--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five.


End file.
